Side of a torso with traditional tattoos: a colour ship in an oval with a banner, and a black outline dagger wrapped in ribbon with red lettering on the ribs.

Traditional ship, dagger and lettering on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The side of a torso shows several tattoos, including a colour traditional ship in a rounded frame with a banner and red flowers, and a black outline dagger wrapped in a ribbon. Red lettering reading WITH FULL FORCE runs down the ribs beside a small red emblem, and further tattoos appear at the top of the frame. The bold outlines and flat colour fills suit the traditional style, and the soft side lighting and white fabric sit behind the skin.

Traditional Ribs Ship Dagger Banner Ribbon Lettering Flower Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time you reached the bottom of the kitchen garden, the wind had already taken the top off the bean poles, and Mrs Ferrier stood at the potting shed door with her arms folded, glaring at the rose bed as though it had insulted her. You had come up from the harbour with a kitbag and a letter of character from a man who had sailed with your father. She did not read the letter. She put a grafting knife into your hand, its handle wound with a faded red ribbon, and said the roses would not prune themselves.

Keep reading

For a week she said nothing that was not an instruction. Cut above the outward bud. Bind the union with raffia, never twine. Wipe the blade between every plant, because canker travels faster than a ship in a following sea. On the eighth morning you found her sitting on the potting bench with the shed's old painted sign across her knees. It showed a three-masted barque under reefed sails, and beneath it, in letters her husband had made himself, were the words WITH FULL FORCE. He had sworn every apprentice on the quay to them, she said, and then he had gone out in a Channel gale and not come back, and the roses were the only thing he had left her that needed tending.

The Albertines climbed the wall that June and flowered in a crimson tumble. One bush on the north side refused to bloom, and you worked at its graft for a month before you admitted it was dead. Mrs Ferrier untied the ribbon from the knife one evening, wrapped it round the stump, and told you to get on with it.

Years later you bought a knife of your own and never tied a ribbon to it. You went out at first light, wiped the blade on your sleeve, and started on the roses.